


Stanley Takes a Very Short Bath

by Anachronistically_Inclined



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, But Everybody Lives, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, Fix-It, Stanley Uris Lives, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-19
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:42:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22314232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anachronistically_Inclined/pseuds/Anachronistically_Inclined
Summary: Fix-it where Stan lives, so Eddie lives too
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Patricia Blum Uris/Stanley Uris, but just the mildest of reddies, they kiss in the background and that's it
Comments: 3
Kudos: 50





	Stanley Takes a Very Short Bath

**Author's Note:**

> Basically the events of It Chapter Two are unchanged, except Stan survives his suicide attempt but can't go to Derry, and his survival means Eddie lives too. This is what Stan's up to during the movie.

After Stan gets the call from Mike, he remembers everything at once. While the other Losers get eased in, it hits Stan in one giant, breathtaking wave. 

And he can’t take it. 

He always knew something wasn’t right. He was aware that there was a giant black pit in his memory. His birth certificate says “Bangor, Maine” and his mother still has all his report cards, and they’re from Derry, all the way through middle school, but he doesn’t remember _any_ of it. Not even his Bar Mitzvah. Who doesn’t remember his Bar Mitzvah?

Patty had asked him about it once, and he gave a non-committal answer. When they had visited his parents, he looked for pictures. He found a single photo of him and his dad, and although it was only 7 years old at the time, the photo was so faded it looked like it had been in the box for decades. 

He writes letters to the Losers, then tells Patty he’s taking a bath. 

Patty hears the water stop running, followed by silence. Suddenly she _knows_ something is wrong. She tries to walk, not run, to the bathroom. When she knocks and there’s no answer, she lets herself panic. She unlocks the door and rushes to Stanley just as he’s loosing consciousness. She grabs his phone off the counter and dials 911. She leaves it on the bathroom floor as the EMTs are loading Stan into the ambulance, alive for the moment.

***

When Bev calls Stan from Mike’s phone the next night, it rings for a long time before going to voicemail.

Beverly and the other Losers still hear Patty tearfully answer and tell them Stan is gone, courtesy of Pennywise. 

***

Stan is moved out of ICU and into his own room around the time Bowers attacks Eddie at the Townhouse. 

He is asleep when the Losers try to ritual of Chüd, with Patty asleep in a chair by his bed (he could have told them the tokens were bullshit ( _they’re gazebos_ ) and that it could never work with only six of the seven people. But Mike already knew that so it wouldn’t have done any good anyway).

Stan dreams about the Deadlights. He dreams about being trapped under Neibolt with a sleeping ( _notdeadnotdeadnotdead_ ) It. Getting more and more lost in the dark. Calling his friends names over and over, hoping they’ll come back, hoping Richie will hear...

He wakes up gasping when Richie is hit with the Deadlights. He _saw_ him in the Deadlights. He sees Eddie dying too, if he can’t help them. He calls out for Patty, and she rushes to the bed. He tells her to take his hands and close her eyes, Patty gives him her hands, panicking, wondering if she can reach the nurse call button with her foot. Stan begins muttering under his breath, and Patty thinks maybe he’s still asleep, a nightmare maybe, because he isn’t making any sense. He’s just repeating “Send him my power” over and over. But she closes her eyes and thinks “please don’t let me lose him”.

Eddie throws the fence post, and Richie crashes to the ground. Eddie leans over Richie, as Ben and Beverly rush back into the chamber. Then Beverly hears Stan, as clear as if he were standing next to her: _It’s not dead, **kill It** Beverly!_ She hears Eddie say “I think I got it, Richie! I think...” ( _he doesn’t believe_ ), sees Richie reach up to touch Eddie’s face and pull his lips down to his...out of the corner of her eye Bev sees It’s leg twitch, and looks down for a weapon, _anything_ , and chucks the nearest rock at It as hard as she can. The rock hits It in the leg, and It jerks, the claw of the leg nicking Eddie’s right shoulder. Richie pulls him up and away, and the six of them run to the cave behind them. Eddie’s bleeding, but it’s shallow. They make a sling out of Richie’s coat (”And I thought we’d play doctor _later_ ” “Beep Beep, Richie”).

They make It small, and when the six of them crush It’s heart, they feel Stan’s fingers too, for just a second. Then It’s gone, and Bev feels Stan leave like an exhale, and the look on Mike and Bill and Ben’s faces says they felt him too. 

Stan opens his eyes and sees tears streaming down Patty’s face. He wipes them off as she opens her eyes. “I’m alright babylove, I just had to make a pit stop” he says, right before he passes out. 

When he wakes up in the morning, the nurses blame the meds and a nightmare for the scare last night, and he lets them. 

When the hospital shrink comes to check on him, this is the story he tells her:

In 1983, the year Stanley turned 13, a number of kids went missing. That same year, a bully name Henry Bowers had decided to pay special attention to him and his friends (”We called ourselves the Losers Club”, he says with a small smile). That summer, things with Henry had begun to escalate. In the mean time, more kids went missing. Finally, in August, the same day Henry Bowers stabbed his old man in the neck and watched him bleed out in his chair, he chased the Losers into the sewers, swearing he’d kill them all.

Stan looked up at this point. He was calm, but all the color had drained of the Patty's and the doctor’s faces.

They had managed to get away from Bowers for awhile, but they ended up in...

“In what, Stanley?”

“A...”

( _nest_ )

“...lair. We found one of Betty Ripsom’s shoes and Georgie’s raincoat.” Stan turned to Patty “Georgie was Bill’s little brother. He was the first to go missing.” He turned back to the psychologist “We had been hanging around near the sewers all summer because Bill was our ringleader, and all we knew was that Georgie had disappeared near a storm drain.”

“We were cornered at that point, but it was seven to one, so we fought back. Honestly, we thought we had killed...

( _It_ )

...him. Then Henry crawled back out of the sewer and back home, where most of Derry’s police were waiting for him. I guess when they arrested him he was still raving about how he had to finish it, how he had to ‘kill them all’. He confessed at the station.”

He paused and sighed, then gave Patty a small smile, “It was the shortest trial in Derry history. They only had evidence that he murdered his father, and he was nearly incoherent by then. But everyone believes he killed those kids, too. And the disappearances all stopped after he was arrested.” He shrugs. 

There’s a moment of silence

“Why didn’t you ever tell me this, Stanley?” Patty asks quietly. 

“I didn’t remember any of it. We moved before I started high school anyway. When Mike called”, he looks at the doc “Mike was one of the Losers, the only one who stayed in Derry. He kept track of us, to make sure we were ok”. He looks back to Patty “Everything came back at once. _Everything_.”

( _You took me into Neibolt! You left me!_ )

“I guess I had blocked everything out until Mike called; Henry Bowers had escaped that day, and every one of us was in danger.”

 _Not technically a lie_ , he thinks.

Patty starts to cry, and Stan holds her. The doctor diagnoses him with PTSD, and recommends a psychiatrist he can see. He is released from the hospital that evening.

When he gets home he sees the missed call from Mike. He feels like everyone is ok, but he needs to know what happened. When Mike sees “Stan Uris” pop up on his screen, he assumes it’s Patty and braces for the worst. By the time they get off the phone everyone has had a turn, and everyone is crying and laughing (and secretly planning a trip to Atlanta).

**Author's Note:**

> I ended up reading the book after obsessing over the movies. So I took a few ideas from the book, like the power of Seven and the "send him my power" bit. And I am bad at endings, so I'm sorry for what feels like an abrupt "and they all lived happily ever after". If I need to edit so it makes more sense, let me know (either more context or in general, I don't have a proofreader).


End file.
